Over 50 and Eat Healthy, But Need Help with Exercise?

Over 50 and Eat Healthy, But Need Help with Exercise?2017-10-242017-10-24https://www.flippingfifty.com/wp-content/uploads/logo-2.pngFlippingFifty: Health, Exercise & Wellness After 50https://www.flippingfifty.com/wp-content/uploads/img_8024.jpg200px200px

“I’m not consistent. It’s mostly because I’m not sure what I’m doing.”

Does this sound familiar?

This post is for you if you’ve felt exercise – or hormones – must be the problem.

It’s especially for you if you’ve ever said:

“I’m barely eating anything and I exercise hard… and I’m not losing a thing”

“I walk 4-5 miles a day and still I can’t lose”

“I snack on fruit, or sugar-free popsicles and Jello and it’s still impossible to lose weight.”

What Does Eat Healthy Even Mean?

First, respectfully, I want to let you know that you may indeed “eat healthy.” But I also know how much of a mistake this thinking is for most midlife women. Many of the “rules” you learned about weight loss, calories, and points are false. They encourage low calorie, low quality food consumption, often with chemicals, toxins, or hormone disruptors (as if that needs help!) that drive you further from your goal instead of towards it.

We unfortunately still mistake skinny as fit. Get closer to a skinny woman before you judge! Look at her skin, her eyes, her energy and you’ll see more pieces of the real story.

If you’re feeling puffy and bloated, or thicker through the middle with unpredictable results from eating well and exercise, it’s frustrating!

At midlife, hormonal changes amplify what we’ve been doing wrong. You may have had that signal every month for a long time but it being subtle enough that it was just passed off as PMS, you didn’t really listen. If you’re in any stage of peri-to-post menopause those symptoms may have just moved in and take up residence for a while. Uninvited house guests.

Getting you back to you is the goal. But not to a point where you’re always hungry, your face is drawn and tight, or you live with limited food choices.

If you haven’t actually tested what you’re eating and how it influences your body, your idea of “eat healthy” it may not be:

Healthy for you

Healthy for you right now

Your exercise may need a tune up. Yet, it may need less of one than you suspect. If you’ve put off exercise because you believe it’s overwhelming or it’s going to be risky or hard or uncomfortable, relax!

It’s simpler than you think. It comes down to narrowing down your focus on what “eat healthy” is for you right now and using the time you have to exercise for your highest priority exercise answers.

There are so many options available to you today. Here’s a small list.

I’d venture to say that there’s something missing that you’ve done (add it in the comments).

Add every variation under the sun that a club, fitness center, trainer or instructor conceptualizes and you’ve got so many options you may not know where to start. It’s like looking at a 25-page menu. It’s whole lot easier to make your decision if you have one page of daily specials.

Matching your goal to your activity or vice versa is the beginning of better results. If you want motivation, you need confidence that what you’re doing gets results.

If you’re end goal is weight loss, bone density, or the hormone balance that is a first step to weight loss, then you can easily narrow down your selection. You can still include:

Your exercise preferences (You gotta love it at best, not hate it at least!)

Your time (you decide not a class length on some arbitrary schedule)

Your recovery needs (you may need 2-3 days between for best fitness and not 1)

If you get the “eat healthy” definition nailed, by testing not guessing, the exercise can fall into place with a fraction of what you may have been doing or thought you had to do.

In fact, more women who are frustrated come to me exercising too much and eating too little. If you do that you’re sending two messages to your body at the same time:

Speed up

Slow down

Your body is designed to keep you safe. The message to slow down will override the other.

I’m going to guess your brain is having a hard time wrapping around this right now. You’re tempted to stop reading or you’re thinking of sharing with a “can you believe this?”

If what you’re doing is not working, you’ve got evidence there’s truth in what I’ve said. You are not a calories in calories out equation.

Your hormones are calling the shots. They always have. But at midlife with more changes than ever before, even than in adolescence when parents fear teenage girls, our mistakes are amplified.

You do want a better exercise plan. Not more.

You want to test your nutrition to either verify whether your current “eat healthy” is true for you. Is there a new eat healthy for you that caters to changing gut health thanks to hormones that can make you drop pounds and fatigue? Could you have much more energy with much less effort and deprivation?

If you test, there’s no guessing. It’s finally not a diet. It’s you listening to what makes you full of energy and avoiding what drains it. You don’t need motivation or discipline to do that. You get to eat healthy, enjoy it, and enjoy the way you feel.

If this resonates with you and you’re realizing it may be both nutrition and exercise (and sleep and stress and some timing around when and what is the right thing…) these two programs were designed not to isolate but to integrate an approach so you don’t have to overhaul it all at once but you can layer change.